Summer Covid Wave

In the past and through the epidemic, r.j. sigmund has been reporting on Covid and the waves that have hit the U.S. He is a good read on the topic of Covid.

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Summer’s Covid wave continues to recede, based on the sketchy data we’re still getting. The CDC’s Covid Surveillance page shows that “test positivity”, (or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive,) fell to 6.7% during the week ending September 27th, down from 7.9% during the week ending September 20th, and also down from 9.5% during the week ending September 13th, and down from 10.9% during the week ending September 6th. Despite those recently decreases, test positivity at 6.7% still matches its high during the past winter’s Covid wave. We’re looking for that to fall below 3% to call this one finished.

Meanwhile, Covid cases accounted for 0.7% of hospital emergency room patients during the week ending September 27th, down from 1.0% of emergency room patients during the week ending September 6th, and down from 1.2% of emergency room patients during the week ending September 13th. That, also, is still quite elevated; emergency room incidence of Covid had fallen to 0.3% this past Spring.

The CDC continues to incorrectly show Covid hospitalization rates for recent weeks before all the data is in. We’ll start by pulling the final hospitalization rates directly from the Covid-Net Hospitalization Surveillance Network. This is the source of the data presented by the CDC as a US hospitalization rate, even though less than 20 states participate.

Covid-Net shows the US Covid hospitalization rate rose to 2.6 per 100,000 population during the week ending September 6th, up from an unrevised 2.4 per 100,000 population during the week ending August 30th, and up from an unrevised 2.3 per 100,000 population during the week ending August 23rd. The CDC’s Covid Surveillance and Data Analytics page shows a Covid hospitalization rate of 1.2 per 100,000 population during the week ending September 27th, down from a 2.2 per 100,000 population during the week ending September 20th, and down from a 2.3 per 100,000 population rate during the week ending September 13th. Those CDC figures, especially for the most recent two weeks, will invariably be revised much higher as more reports come in. For instance, the CDC originally showed the hospitalization rate for August 30th at 1.3 per 100,000 population, before it was revised higher, ultimately to 2.4 per 100,000, the next two weeks.

The CDC continues to show Covid accounted for 0.8% of all US deaths during the week ending September 27th for the fourth week in a row, with none of those figures revised, That makes this summer’s wave the least deadly of the 11 waves we’ve experienced since the disease first hit the US in early 2020. The actual count of confirmed Covid deaths, which is lagged by three weeks, shows there were 246 Covid deaths during the week ending August 30th, down from an unrevised 253 Covid deaths during the week ending August 23rd, and down from an unrevised 247 Covid deaths during the week ending August 16th. That is the first time in memory we’ve had unrevised death counts like that, so i’m not even sure those were updated this week…